MBP 15" cannot boot into OSX

I have a 6 month old 15" MBP, 8gb RAM and 7200 rpm 500gb HDD, core i7 2.3gHz. I am on holiday in Argentina, and about 2 days ago it ran really slowly. I shut it down to restart, and then whenever i boot into mac it just shows the apple logo and a spinning circle underneath. However, i can boot into windows on bootcamp, but sometimes windows freezes (maybe or maybe not related?!) This is a $4 grand laptop and i now regret buying it! if im stuck with windows i might as well get a decent ultrabook, and this and the fact that when my iphone died (under warranty) with a known fault, apple asked for £150 to fix it (!) i am now becoming anti apple!
Any body got any ideas..? being at boarding school when i get back, and being miles from an apple store, DIY is really my only option (i do have apple care tho..)

You've got a great laptop David...I have the exact same one. It looks like OS X may have gotten corrupted. Do you have 10.6 still on it or did you move to 10.7?

Haalcyon said:

You've got a great laptop David...I have the exact same one. It looks like OS X may have gotten corrupted. Do you have 10.6 still on it or did you move to 10.7?

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I moved to 10.7 but now some of my friends also have stability issues! one guy lost all his data on his MBA and apple denied responsibility!
but i have the 10.6 disk in my box, im back in england in 3 days. is there possibly a diskless fix? or do i need a fresh reinstall.... but thanks for the help

oh sh*t now tried booting into windows again and it comes up with start up repair, i left it for 3 hrs now and no change!!!

There is possibly a DVD-diskless fix. Reboot your Mac and while its trying to boot hold down the Command+R to enter Lion's Recovery mode where there are some utilities that may be able to resuscitate your OS X install.

You should end up in Mac OS X Utilities. Go to Disk Utilities and look for your OS X partition in the left-hand window and select 'Repair Disk'

It gives invalid record count and invalid node structure, and is stuck on 2 mins estimated time! I will leave overnight but if not working tomorrow, what should I do? :s

Well, if Disk Utility is unable to complete the repair you may be faced with a more serious problem that requires an OS re-install.

Hmm I think will have to copy hdd and wipe..

sorry for the massively late reply but apple had to replace the hard drive.. :/

Wow, well its good they got it replaced. A bad HDD, yuck.